A Different Perspective of Electronic Games

About

Take a different point of view to see things clearly.

I am Tina Ziemek and this is my quest to play electronic games and evaluate them based on my perception of the game - in particular the game’s graphics, interactive techniques, and user interface. The goal of this blog is to identify, describe, and log the aspects of each game that were intuitive, easy, difficult, or impossible for me to learn. I do not like to lose, but it is worse when I lose because of issues related to usability. I prefer games that are easy to learn but difficult to master. I play all types of games that vary in release date, genre, and platform.

I became interested in visual perception and how it impacts gameplay because I used to be a gamer back in the NES/SNES era but I noticed a change in my gaming habits as I got older; I wasn’t as attracted to video games as I once had been. The change was in part due to new time commitments (social and work related), but it was also because of a change in the games themselves. Three-dimensional computer graphics were becoming more pervasive in video games, and with the change in graphics also came a change in gameplay. For me, issues related to navigation and disorientation in a 3D environment negatively affect my gameplay and make me not want to play. Sometimes a game’s graphics will even make me feel nauseous and I will have to stop playing.

I began to conduct research on visuospatial thinking and 3D computer graphics and how they impact a user’s performance in computer graphics applications. I found that I wasn’t alone in my frustrations, and that accurately perceiving a virtual world is a difficult task for some users. For more information please visit my research page.

About Tina Plays Games

Tina reviews games in light of her research on visual perception and computer graphics and is working on increasing her n00b gamer skillz to something more legit. This blog focuses on Tina's perspective of games - in particular the game's graphics, interactive techniques, and user interface.